You could expect a company to punish a Chairman that took it through the depths of the multi-billion dollar Dieselgate cheating scandal, but that hasn’t happened at Audi.

Audi’s own supervisory board and that of the parent company, the Volkswagen Group, had been trying to get Rupert Stadler out the door ever since Munich prosecutors took him into custody over Dieselgate in June this year.

But Stadler proved unwilling to go, having signed a new five-year contract as Audi Chairman just a month earlier, extending his role until 2022. Yesterday, he finally settled up with his now-former employers for a €8 million, according to German newspaper Handelsblatt.

The only catch is that he has to be found not guilty of any charges related to the Dieselgate prosecutions launched by the German states of Braunschweig and Bavaria, as well as the United States Department of Justice.

While not suspected of being involved in the development and implementation of the emissions-cheating software that cost the Volkswagen Group more than €20 billion, he was arrested and imprisoned on suspicion of influencing witnesses to the Bavarian investigation after being overhead on a tapped telephone call.

The fixed component of his five-year contract would be worth about €15 million a year while his board contract with Volkswagen was, according to its annual report, worth another €5.25 million in 2017.

Volkswagen has already been criticized for paying out more than €13 million to former powertrain development head, Wolfgang Hatz, when it sacked him over Dieselgate.

It even paid out big money to the executive it brought in to clean up its culture at the height of the crisis.

The Volkswagen Group paid lawyer Christine Hohmann-Dennhardt €6.3 million to buy her out of her Daimler contract and bring her on board as its board member in charge of Integrity and Legal Affairs, then paid her another €6.9 million to leave 13 months later.

BMW development director Markus Duesmann will take the Audi chair when his non-compete clause expires in about a year. Photo by TF-Images/Getty Images

Duesmann headed up BMW’s powertrain department while Diess was the Munich brand’s Director of Development, though he can’t start work at Audi until September 2019. In the meantime, its Director of Sales, Bram Schott, will run the brand.

Negotiating hard was about all Stadler had to do with his time at Augsburg prison in southern Bavaria after the court officially rejected his appeal release over suspicions of tampering with Dieselgate witnesses.

Volkswagen and Audi were both reluctant to sack Stadler outright, fearing a massive payout with allegations in open court should he eventually be proven innocent.

A 25-year veteran of automotive journalism, I have no financial interests or other dogs in the fights I write about.